An obscene phone call gone wrong started everything. Instead of the gay phone sex he planned, Tucson real estate agent, Marc, finds himself talking to a straight University of Arizona undergraduate named Bart who has no interest in Marc’s sexual come-on. But instead of hanging up, they hang on and continue to talk. When, after refusing to meet Marc in person for months, Bart finally relents, a journey begins which takes both of them in totally unexpected directions.

More complications arise when Leslie, a girl from one of Bart’s classes appears in his life and then leaves six months later. Bart and Marc move to LA where Bart becomes a minor soap opera sex symbol and Leslie, now a college professor, suddenly reappears.

What seemed to be one kind of relationship between Bart and Marc becomes another, and then yet still another. And when a newspaper reporter begins digging into Bart’s life, he is forced to come to terms with who he is and what labels, if any, describe him. What will happen when Bart’s insistence on honesty lets the world know the truth about the three of them?

EXCERPT:Note: may contain sexually explicit scenes of a homoerotic nature.

I didn’t want to push the idea of meeting in person, but, after two months, I was getting frustrated that we couldn’t do things together. We could talk about what we’d done or would do or wanted to do individually, but we couldn’t eat together or go to a movie or just hang out.

It was his English lit class that brought things to a head.

I knew he was going to be reading The Importance of Being Earnest, which is hands-down one of my favorite plays. I was excited about that and couldn’t wait to be able to talk to him about it.

Then I saw in the paper that the Tucson Playhouse had a production of Earnest coming up the beginning of November. I had to find a way to see that with him.

It was already late October, and I decided to use the play to broach the subject again. But I had to be careful.

“Hey, kid, you know what date it is?”

“Sure, old man, the twenty-fifth.”

The kid/old man thing from our second conversation had stuck for some reason. It was pretty much our standard form of address to each other by then. I loved it. I thought of it as giving our talks a kind of intimacy we couldn’t have any other way.

“You know what’s coming up on the twenty-seventh?”

“Remembering what a thing you made about it last month, how could I forget? Our anniversary, as you call it,” he said with a comic sneer in his voice.

He was right. It was the anniversary of our first phone call.

“Don’t knock it, kid. Anyhow, you know how you told me you’re going to be reading The Importance of Being Earnest?”

“Yeah, but that won’t be for a while yet. What’s that got to do with the twenty-seventh?”

“Well, Tucson Playhouse is doing a production of Earnest in a couple of weeks.”

Short silence.

“An-nd?” He drew the word out almost into two syllables. It was clear he could see what was coming.

“Wouldn’t it be great if we went to see it together?”

Silence.

I had to get it out and I didn’t want him to be able to interrupt and object, so really fast as though it were all one sentence, I said: “But in order to see it together we’d have to finally meet right and we wouldn’t want to meet that night for the very first time would we so it seemed to me that the twenty-seventh would be a great day to finally meet. What do you think?”

More silence.

“C’mon, Bart. We’ve got to at least talk about it. I’ve been really good about not bringing it up lately. And remember that rule number one is still in effect, so you don’t have to worry about me jumping you -- or should I say, my jumping you?”

He laughed -- a bit nervously, but still, a good sign.

“You’re right, Marc. We’ve got to talk about it.”

The switch from kid/old man to Bart/Marc meant we were on more serious ground. That was good. He was willing to discuss it.

“Every time I’ve brought it up, you’ve shied away from it. Why?”

“I guess I didn’t want to spoil anything.”

“Why should it spoil anything?”

“What if I don’t like the way you look or you don’t like the way I look?”

“Bart, you’re straight, and we’re just friends. Why should our looks make any difference?”

Of course, when we did finally meet, I found that looks, his looks, were the crux of the problem in a totally unexpected way.

A pause. “You’re right. I guess we’ve got to meet face to face. No matter what happens.”

“That’s a bit mysterious. Why should anything happen?”

“You’ll see. Okay. October twenty-seventh. Where?”

“You sound like someone making an appointment to have a tooth pulled. The twenty-seventh is Tuesday, and you’re usually at school late. How about at the library, by the outside snack area near the vending machines?”

“What time?”

He clearly wasn’t enthusiastic.

“Five-thirty? Assuming neither one of us is a basilisk and strikes the other dead with a single glance, we could go eat dinner.”